Policy.
Regulation 2.0, trust & safety, net neutrality, the law catching up
- Institutions and Abuse
For the past few months, it seems like I can’t read the news without coming across another horrifying story of sexual abuse within “esteemed” institutions. Today marks the release of the “Freeh Report” — the independent analysis of what happened at Penn State with Jerry Sandusky. The Washington Pos...
- Fights for the Future on Many Fronts
One of the things I’ve learned over the past few months is that the fight for the future is being fought on many, many fronts — and these fights take all shapes and sizes, and are constantly shifting and re-forming. Here are a few that are hot this week — each of which will be… Continue reading
- Thinking about Freedom
For the past few weeks, I’ve been involved with a community effort to draft a declaration of freedom for the Internet. On Monday, it went live on the web, and is starting to get discussed. It’s been an amazing, fascinating and inspiring year in the internet community. Today, the Verge has a nicely...
- Hacking Patents
Last week at the Media Lab, we had the pleasure of hosting USPTO Director Dave Kappos and several members of the PTO’s senior staff, to brainstorm ways that we might use technology in creative ways to help the patent office work better, and to help the patent system work better in general. The meet...
- Creativity and Free Culture
This morning started out in such a great way. I’m on a mailing list at the Media Lab called “awesome”, and this morning Kasia Hayden sent around a link to this incredible piece of creative work: It’s a marriage proposal presented as a “live lip-dub” of Bruno Mars’ “Marry You“. Basically a live mus...
- Corruption: Make it your #2 Issue
Continuing my series of posts on this week’s Freedom to Connect conference, here is Larry Lessig‘s closing keynote. It was a big thrill for me to see Larry deliver one of his trademark presentations in person. I remember the first time I saw one online: his Free Culture introduction from OSCON 2002...
- Step Number One: Internet Access
In the spirit of posting highlights from this week’s Freedom to Connect conference, I’d like to next point to the talk given by former FCC chairman Michael Copps, entitled “Step Number One to Getting our Democracy Right”. Here’s the video: The full text is here, and it’s probably a quicker read tha...
- Innovation Under Austerity
Yesterday at the Freedom to Connect conference, Eben Moglen delivered a fantastic talk entitled “Innovation Under Austerity”. It’s about an hour long and is really worth the watch. Eben lays out, in clear, compelling terms, the case for open, decentralized, bottom-up innovation as the clearest way ...
- Netizen Effects
Last week, Twitter did something big: they introduced a new patent assignment agreement that binds them to use their patent arsenal only for defensive purposes. In an environment where things are getting ugly in software patent land, this is a bold move. The agreement (here on GitHub), which they’l...
- Loud power and quiet power
When the Internet erupted on January 18th to voice its discontent with SOPA and PIPA, it was a moment of loud power. Fight for the Future has a nice infographic describing everything that happened that day: 115,00 websites blacked out, 10mm signatures gathered, 8mm calls to congress; all in one day...